Sports Premium

What it is

The government has chosen to invest in Primary School Physical Education and School Sport. They have done this by offering each primary school £8000 plus £5 per pupil to be spent in any way the school thinks best to improve the teaching and learning of PE and School Sport in their individual school.

How we are using it at St George’s

After listening to some pitches from outside sporting agencies, St George’s felt that we have a strong PE team and very good sport provision particularly in terms of what we offer for before and after school Sporting clubs and our participation and involvement in festivals and competitions. We have therefore chosen to use the money to pay for release time for our qualified PE staff to improve the teaching and learning of PE and School Sport in the following ways:

Upskilling staff

After completing a staff audit, we established a baseline of where PE is now including how often it is taught, the confidence of the staff and children participation and engagement. We also conducted pupil and parent surveys to gauge the impact of PE further. We then completed a timetable that has allowed a member of staff to be released to support and team teach PE with each teacher within our school on a termly basis. PE observations at the end of the year will give us evidence of the impact that this training and support will have had.

Sports Leaders

Key findings suggest that opportunities to train as playground sports leaders enhances pupils’ achievement and enjoyment of PE. Release time has been used to implement a playleaders scheme, order resources and train the Year 6 children into becoming effective leaders.

Some comments so far have included ‘I’ve never seen the infants so engaged with their games’ and ‘The year 6s showed a lot of responsibility today and taught some skills of how to play fair’.

Assessment for learning – a skills based approach

We felt that effective teaching and learning of PE also includes staff being clear about how to plan and assess PE effectively. We are therefore also using the release time to establish an effective way of assessing PE that will work along side our planning and will be based on assessing the skills in PE rather than a specific learning objective for that lesson. This will be a proforma that the staff will be able to use a little later in the term.